


Beneath the Aurora

by willowbilly



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: 12 Days of Carnivale, Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Future Fic, Goodsir Lives, Marriage, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Post-Season/Series 01, Wedding Fluff, well more like wedding-as-fuel-to-the-fluff-fire but you get the picture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-25 23:30:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17130758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowbilly/pseuds/willowbilly
Summary: During the long winter's night, that night which lasts for literal months on end, the awful memories of what he has endured and what he has committed lift somewhat from where they habitually press in upon his consciousness. His conscience is finally allowed to breathe, purified by the freezing burn of the frigid air which scours his lungs and prickles scentless in his nose. His hands are more often than not enfolded by a warm pair of fur mittens... and one of them, further, is held by Silna's hand.





	Beneath the Aurora

**Author's Note:**

> For the 12 Days of Carnivale prompt "a long winter's night."

It is odd how he is happiest nowadays in the darkest and coldest of the year. Goodsir associates the worst of his suffering, that which was dealt to him by Hickey's hands, with the arctic summer. With white skies and stark light falling against the rocks. With his own hands bare as he committed abominations against what remained of his fellow man.

But during the long winter's night, that night which lasts for literal months on end, the awful memories of what he has endured and what he has committed lift somewhat from where they habitually press in upon his consciousness. His conscience is finally allowed to breathe, purified by the freezing burn of the frigid air which scours his lungs and prickles scentless in his nose. His hands are more often than not enfolded by a warm pair of fur mittens... and one of them, further, is held by Silna's hand.

She stays close to him. With only the two of them and Crozier, it is imperative that they all do as much as they can for food and shelter and peace of mind, for if one of them fails the other two must work that much harder to ensure that all three of them do not starve or succumb to the elements, and if one of them falls while out alone it could spell disaster should they not be found in time.

Silna is still teaching them how to survive in this land. How to make what they need, from the ice and from every part of whatever animal they catch. How to wait in silence at a seal's breathing hole with a harpoon poised across the knees for hours, patient and motionless on the ice as the day's navy sky wheels into starfields and auroras overhead.

She is not so silent nowadays, though. She laughs almost often with them, and smiles even more; Goodsir cherishes every hint of her joy nearly more than he can bear. She sighs, with wistfulness or with pleasure, and she'll huff in annoyance, and Goodsir is so accustomed to the minutest of her expressions that he feels as though all words are rendered obsolete before the complexity and completeness of this new language which has grown between them. He sometimes translates what she wants to say to Crozier when he cannot grasp her meaning from the hand signals she has taken to using.

Goodsir tells Silna that he loves her at every opportunity. If they have been apart for so much as five seconds he makes sure to greet her and tell her so. She lets him, and takes him by the shoulders to draw him down so that she can press her face to his, noses slotting against cheeks, his beard tickling her face, her hand moving to the back of his head to cradle his skull. He thinks she likes the oddity of his facial hair; she smiles when her mouth is pressed into it against his, and tugs the thicket which has cropped up over his chin when she is teasing him, and she combs her fingers absently through it when they are snug and sleepy beneath their hide blankets.

They sleep together, now, separate from Crozier. They sleep as a married couple.

Crozier himself had officiated at what passed for their wedding; it was a lark which had been followed through with at Silna's half-curious, half-playful insistence, despite their being only the three of them, and despite Silna and Goodsir's relationship having already long since grown to be intimate.

“The last duty I'll ever perform as anyone's captain,” Crozier had said to Goodsir of his officiating, a grave vein of sorrow running beneath the lighthearted tone which he'd obviously intended to take. There was a permanent loss in him since they'd found the last of his men dead. But Silna and Goodsir still manage to make him smile, as well, now and again.

Goodsir had hugged him, and then immediately apologized for daring to do so. Crozier had cut off Goodsir's babbling by hugging him heartily back.

Silna captured their attention by whacking them with Goodsir's old shirt. That was what had started it; she had draped the threadbare scrap of off-white cloth over her face to show how see-through it was becoming, and Crozier, with a gleam in his eye, had said that it looked as close to a wedding veil as anything here.

She'd raised her brows at them once she had gotten them to look at her and had gestured, her hands flowing and chopping out the signs for doing something now, and for her and Goodsir together, and for outside, and for under the sky. She ended her speech by flinging the shirt decisively over her head, covering more of her lovely, mischievous face than she did her glossy black hair, and Goodsir, impulsively and suddenly somewhat frantic in his own eagerness to follow her lead for as long as she would have him, had said, “I do!”

“Hold your horses, did you not _hear_ the woman?” Crozier asked, his solemnity banished in favor of humor as the preciousness of the present situation momentarily overcomes his many ghosts. “She wants to be wed beneath the stars, Harry.”

“Of— of course,” Goodsir stuttered, abashed, and Silna emerged from the shirt and tapped his blushing cheek to remind him that all was well.

Going outside of the iglu and into the uncompromising cold was as much a shock as being splashed in the face with a bucket of water. The first breath always physically, rib-creakingly hurt. And then the cold of it settled, scraping clean and clear through the airways. No other air Goodsir had ever breathed was so blazingly clean.

And the _clearness_ of it—! The stars were so large and sparklingly white one would have expected to be able to reach up and pluck them from the firmament, as one might harvest scattered diamonds from the bottom of a dark, shallow pool. And even the stars paled in comparison to the weird glow of the aurora borealis, bands and ribbons of eerie green stretching out into a hazy, slowly rippling arc, far greater and more glorious than any wedding arch the earth had to offer.

Crozier valiantly fumbled through an extemporaneous, heartfelt address, and Goodsir heard none of it, too dazzled by Silna before him, her face deeply framed and shadowed by the luxuriant fringe of her hood, his old shirt still draped over her hair beneath, her eyes soft and eloquent, overflowing with an adoration which threatened to make him cry with gratitude and with his own reciprocal, unconditional surge of love.

They had exchanged vows there, on the ice, below the sweeping grandeur of the winter's sky. When Crozier had said that he may kiss the bride, and the fur of Silna's hood had rustled against that of his when they had pushed their faces together to create a single space of warmth between them, and as their lips met— Goodsir had almost died of happiness.

He thinks, every day he now lives, that he will die of happiness. Or at least, as Silna tucks herself against his back and pulls him in to settle comfortably against her chest, the both of them safe and warm in their bed, he knows that he will die with this memory enshrined within his heart. He will die _with_ happiness, rather than in the midst of suffering. Goodsir has no more need of the terror of the past when he has Silna, with all her fearsome, beautiful, steadfast courage, at his side.

 

 


End file.
